Previous research on Montessori preschool education is inconsistent and prone to analytic flexibility. In this preregistered study, disadvantaged preschoolers in a French public school were randomly ...assigned to either conventional or Montessori classrooms, with the latter being adapted to French public education. Adaptations included fewer materials, shorter work periods, and relatively limited Montessori teacher training. Cross-sectional analyses in kindergarten (N = 176; Mage = 5-6) and longitudinal analyses over the 3 years of preschool (N = 70; Mage = 3-6) showed that the adapted Montessori curriculum was associated with outcomes comparable to the conventional curriculum on math, executive functions, and social skills. However, disadvantaged kindergarteners from Montessori classrooms outperformed their peers on reading (d = 0.68). This performance was comparable to that of advantaged children from an accredited Montessori preschool.
Focusing on a single source within a complex auditory scene is challenging. M/EEG-based auditory attention detection allows to detect which stream, within a set of multiple concurrent streams, an ...individual is attending to. The high inter-individual variability in the AAD performance is most often attributed to physiological factors and signal to noise ratio of neural data. Here we address the hypothesis that cognitive factors and in particular sustained attention, WM and attentional inhibition, may also partly explain the variability in AAD performance, because they support the cognitive processes required when listening to complex auditory scenes. Here, we chose a particularly challenging auditory scene, by presenting dichotically polyphonic classical piano excerpts lasting one minute each. Two different excerpts were presented simultaneously in each ear. Forty-one participants, with different degrees of musical expertise, listened to these complex auditory scenes focussing on one ear while we recorded the EEG. Participants also completed several tasks assessing executive functions. As expected, attended stimuli were better decoded than unattended stimuli. Importantly, attentional inhibition ability did explain around 10% of the reconstruction accuracy and around 8% of the classification accuracy. No other cognitive function was a significant predictor of reconstruction or of classification accuracies. No clear effect of musical expertise was found on reconstruction and classification performances. In conclusion, cognitive factors seem to impact the robustness of the auditory representation and hence the performance of neural based decoding approaches. Taking advantage of this relation could be useful to improve next-generation hearing aids.
Studying the population’s perception of coastal erosion is essential and is increasingly used by coastal administrators, especially because it strongly influences the acceptance of coastal adaptation ...strategies. This article explores the population’s perception of coastal risk on the Atlantic coast of France (Pays de la Loire region) that is an at-risk territory historically affected by erosion and is particularly sensitive to coastal flooding. The major goal of the paper is to collect data in terms of risk perception by carrying out a field survey on three territorial collectivities, with the aim to enhance the feasibility of the managed retreat operations that will be implemented on this coast in the next years. A total of 700 surveys were collected and several original results can be drawn: the population has a good knowledge of erosion in the area where they live, and this knowledge is key because the territory is vulnerable. Similarly, the respondents have a good knowledge of protection measures, but some are more important than others: for example, the reinforcement of coastal defenses is the most commonly cited strategy to deal with coastal hazards whereas relocation is the second-most-known but least-popular scenario. Several factors influence people’s perception of risk: for example, time spent in the residence and age of residents are two elements contributing to place attachment that must be taken into account before starting to implement any climate adaptation policies.
How social interactions influence cognition is a fundamental question, yet rarely addressed at the neurobiological level. It is well established that the presence of conspecifics affects learning and ...memory performance, but the neural basis of this process has only recently begun to be investigated. In the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the presence of other flies improves retrieval of a long-lasting olfactory memory. Here, we demonstrate that this is a composite memory composed of two distinct elements. One is an individual memory that depends on outputs from the α′β′ Kenyon cells (KCs) of the mushroom bodies (MBs), the memory center in the insect brain. The other is a group memory requiring output from the αβ KCs, a distinct sub-part of the MBs. We show that social facilitation of memory increases with group size and is triggered by CO2 released by group members. Among the different known neurons carrying CO2 information in the brain, we establish that the bilateral ventral projection neuron (biVPN), which projects onto the MBs, is necessary for social facilitation. Moreover, we demonstrate that CO2-evoked memory engages a serotoninergic pathway involving the dorsal-paired medial (DPM) neurons, revealing a new role for this pair of serotonergic neurons. Overall, we identified both the sensorial cue and the neural circuit (biVPN>αβ>DPM>αβ) governing social facilitation of memory in flies. This study provides demonstration that being in a group recruits the expression of a cryptic memory and that variations in CO2 concentration can affect cognitive processes in insects.
We examined the contributions of phoneme-to-word facilitation and word-to-word inhibition to transposed-phoneme priming effects under unimodal and cross-modal presentations. Experiments 1A and 1B ...showed that the presentation of an auditory prime formed by transposing two phonemes in a given target word facilitated lexical decisions to auditory targets. This facilitation was independent of the lexicality of the primes. In Experiment 2 the targets were presented visually rather than auditorily. We found an inhibitory priming effect, which, in contrast to Experiment 1, was influenced by the lexicality of the primes, with an effect emerging only with word primes. These findings point to a greater impact of phoneme-to-word facilitation under unimodal presentation and a greater role for word-to-word inhibition under cross-modal presentation. Hence, by simply manipulating the modality of target presentation, it is possible to separately probe two central mechanisms postulated in models of spoken word recognition, namely phoneme-to-word activation and lexical competition.
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